Category: HDHomeRun Prime

In case anyone was curious if the recent update to XBMC 12 fixed the upnp streaming problem introduced in XBMC 12.1, I have to report that it unfortunately did not fix it. The item appears to be on track for getting fixed in XBMC 13 though, as can be seen on this bugfix ticket: http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/14204

This video is an overview of what an HDHomerun Prime can do for you. I talk about the initial setup, what you need to have to get it to work, and show you how you can use it to watch TV on Windows Media Center and XBMC.

WINDOWS MEDIA CENTER

Setup on WMC is super easy; once you have configured the HDHomerun and scanned for channels, just open WMC and do the first time setup. Media Center will do the rest for you, and after downloading and installing a few more programs you will be up and running. Recording TV is also super easy.

XBMC

Everyone’s favorite open source media center is a little bit more tricky. First of all the recent 12.1 upgrade to XBMC broke the UPNP support that Silicondust just patched into the Homerun firmware. Secondly, if you want to use XBMC to record or watch live tv using the funcionality added in Frodo you will need to install another piece of software that will interact with the Homerun on XBMC’s behalf. We will call this software the recording backend. Then you need to configure a plugin on XBMC to interact with the recording backend. Sounds complicated? It is a little bit, but there is various different software out there that can get this accomplished for you. I am hoping to cover that next.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I really love my Homerun. Being able to watch TV in high def on any of my computers in the house is very convenient, and you can even install the Homerun software on a laptop and watch TV that way without having to have a TV tuner in the laptop.

As far as recording and watching from within XBMC, it is still a little bit clunky at this point in time, but I am sure now that this support has been rolled into the main branch of XBMC it will steadily improve over the next couple of version.

Openelec 3.0 came out this week. This is great news for people who love the slightly more streamlined branch of XBMC. Openelec 3.0 is on the same feature set as XBMC 12.1. Here’s a snippet of the official release:

OpenELEC 3.0 is built to support XBMC Frodo 12.1 and almost every part of the core OS has been updated and improved since the 2.0 release. The project now supports a broader range of mediacentre hardware than ever before, including dedicated OS images for the budget friendly Arctic MC001 and ultra-low-cost Raspberry Pi systems.

I am also very happy about the fact that Silicondust, the makers of the HDhomerun Prime have moved their beta firmware from the HDhomerun Prime that supported DLNA/Upnp streaming into general release. This means you can not use XBMC’s “UPNP” file type to tune your HDhomerun prime. Very cool.

There is however one small problem; When XBMC 12.1 came out, apparently something got added/changes/patched that broke the UPNP streaming for the HDhomerun. See the bugreport posted here. I was able to verify that the UPNP streaming does in fact work on XBMC 12, but is broken on 12.1. We’ll have to wait and see if that gets fixed soon.